A slight change of direction – a memory from later in my life – only 17 years ago to be exact.
Yes, that’s a clipped article from The Times newspaper.
I have a friend (Yes I do!) and she’s an amazing woman; determined and courageous with a heart of pure gold.
We ‘met’ online in the LineOne chatrooms and hit it off immediately. A similar sense of humour and faith in natural justice – Karma if you will – and she invited us (@s0u1 and I) to go visit. We met her kids, cats, dogs, chinchillas and ferrets and a life-long friendship was formed.
She introduced me to the online first-person ‘shoot-em-up’ game, Quake 2. ‘Buffy’, as we knew her, started an all-girl clan called ‘Sisters of Battle’ – SoB. Yeah, we didn’t exactly win any major awards, but we did have a lot of fun.
My nickname on the chatrooms was Bat-girl and I kept that for playing Q2. I did OK, not great, but not terrible. There were a lot of guys better than me and a few women (not many). I really enjoyed playing in the Duel Arena and whether I lost or won, (I mainly lost) the comment usually popped up: Batgirl… are you really a girl?
Yeah… really-really.
When Buffy got her feet under the table, so to speak, she started organising events to compliment the LAN parties held at our house – our first one consisted of 14 computers down the centre of our living room, with 28 people attending and most staying over at the house. Article from way-back-when…
The second-best player in the world - the BEST in the UK, Europe and probably the US - arrived and we were all enthralled. The best player in the game at that time was T-1000 (Australian, I believe), but Raptor was a close second.
Raptor was lovely! He was kind, patient and shy. We watched as he played on our LAN system and totally understood how he was so good! He was actually part-computer – a BIG part of his brain hooked into the computer and talked to it like it was actually his own brain-matter… No, NOT really.
He was just exceptionally good and he knew the game inside and out. He listened to his opponent and knew exactly where he was in the game and then he’d sit and wait for him to appear and POP the blue spiral of the rail-gun marked another corpse and a re-spawn.
Buffy organised days out at Paintball, with a sleep-over for those travelling long-distance. She also organised her own LAN parties and hired warehouses to set them up in.
As I said, one awesome lady.
We were invited to her wedding and travelled down with the kids (and the cake which I made).
(oh wow, this is throwing up SO many memories, I may have to do another post…)
Back to the first picture, then.
Buffy organised a trip into London to The Playing Fields – a business set up for online gamers to play in competition where there was no lag (back in the days of dial-up modems, lag was a massive problem and could cost the game).
We arrived, signed in and went to look around.
The competitions were mainly to showcase the new Counter Strike game; a new release.
I wasn’t playing that, but Buffy was – she’d already set up a clan.
I found a game of Q2 and gave the owner a floppy disk.
“What’s this?” he said, looking at it.
“My configs,” I said.
“Oh… I wasn’t expecting this…” he said and wandered off to put my configs into the main computer.
Configs are the settings I used to play. I had keys set for various weapons and actions and I knew them off by heart because I’d developed them over the time I’d been playing.
He came back and handed me the floppy disk.
“Sorry… something went wrong. I’ve wiped them,” he said.
Instead of putting my configs into the computer, he’d wiped them off the disk and the game was about to start.
I hastily wrote some of the more important configs onto the computer I was using for the match and as the countdown hit 0, I had just about managed to get sorted.
The Playing Fields had sponsored a girl from Ireland to come over to play some demonstration games at Q2 and I found myself in a game against her.
It was all going well, most of the players had dropped out, there was me and the Irish girl playing head-to-head.
Another player entered the game and they teamed-up.
Right! I thought, That’s how it’s going down, is it?
The owner of The Playing Fields teamed up with his star-player and set about attacking me.
Well, I suppose it’s only right… I was kinda making a mockery of his sponsored ‘demo-girl’.
Even with the two of them against me, I won. (‘Course I did… I’m exceptionally competitive.)
Then a woman wanted to speak to us.
Most of the women there were not gamers and the event was never designed to really be about gaming, it was a publicity stunt and fund-raiser.
When we showed up and started winning the games, it was a little bit of a shock to them – ah well… you live and learn.
After the woman interviewed us, I went and had one game of Counter Strike. Buffy and Cheyanne got together and played against me. Cheyanne was a novice and Buffy took her under her wing to show her how the game was played.
I just winged it as usual.
Just as I destroyed Buffy’s ‘team’ by blowing myself up as they attacked, someone from the organisation team passed by.
“Did you just blow those two up?” she said.
“Yeah… and myself. That means I lost,” I said.
“Yes, but you blew them up! Here, you win this!” and she handed me a brand-new, limited edition boxed Quake III game – not-yet released!
I still have that game… and I haven’t played it.
We made our way back to Buffy’s house where we were staying for the night. I got a little het-up at some of the questions the interviewer asked and decided to write my own article.
I’ll have to see if I can find it because it caused absolute UPROAR!
Because of the furore I caused, sponsors backed out of commitments (I’m still sorry about that). They had completely underestimated the girl-side of gaming. We didn’t want prizes of fashion boutique vouchers, we wanted AMD chips, joysticks, new monitors etc as prizes, you know, like the boys got!
The up-side of writing a full and sincere apology was that I was invited to write for an online magazine – Anyone remember BarrysWorld magazine? Wiki
I was also invited to travel the world as a journalist covering the online games scene.
I had two small children and couldn’t possibly commit to all that – it would have been cool, sure, but no.